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STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 e (415) 321-1200

STANFORD Universtry ScHOOL OF MEDICINE BEC I 8 1969

Department of Genetics

Personal
Morton Mibtz, Washington Post
Your overview article on cyclamates a few weeks ago was superb!

Have you followed the atrocious way that NATURE handled this
business in the last fewweeks. (C&EN at least printed a raft of letters
in reply, and also invited me to do a guest editorial which quite
contradicted their own production -- Hut see how they subtitledd in
the table of contents for that issue!)

To the point: the response in Nature is merely symptomaticcof the
way that Finch & Co. managed the announcement and the ban. They did
their best to make it appear as a piece of arbitrary bureaucracy, and
as far as I can tell made no effort to explain or justify the scientific
reasoning that would lead any knowledgeable person to take very seriously
"cancer in six rats at high doses". You and I and very few others have
tried to disseminate this reasoning. Hut it is coming home to me
that it was a malfeasance of office for the ikW not to do so itself.
And of course when Finch comes out later and sugpests dropping the
Delaney amendment, you can see what's behind it.

Many of my professional colleagues are still upset with some
residual confusion. Tarring MiNX, which they rarely read or trust, few
of the medical journals have had anything to say on the subject. So
this is another sezment of the communication svstem that nas flunked.

‘I do urge you to keep this up --e.g. you might interview J.Hi.
Weisburger at Nat. Cancer Inst. who is one of the most knowledgeable
people around on the subject of carcinogenicity testing. It takes more
than I can put into She kind of column I can do to get the main ideas
across -- fot example extrapolating the dose-response curves from experi-
mental to population exposure levels needs some graphics. But TI would
not forget about hammering home the political point: whose respensibility
it should have been in the first place.

Sincerely,

Goshua Lederberg

LY, J. P. KENNEDY, JR. LABORATORIES FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE, DEDICATED 1O RESEARCH IN MENTAL RETARDATION

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY - HEREDITY NEUROBIOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE